The Wind in the Wires
by silvr-dagger
Summary: Yuffie returns to a dead city, and finds an old friend waiting.


In a city of cracked concrete, steel piled on steel, spirits linger. Midgar is abandoned, collapsing in on itself, but rumors say that a pilgrim wandering the empty streets might catch an echo of voices, or footsteps vanishing down an alley, and hurry after them to find nothing there. The wind picks up, blowing trash and leaves over the ground. Electricity crackles along dead wires.

Yuffie doesn't look up. She looks down, and then around, at the scrawl of long-faded graffiti and the little yellow flowers growing through cracks in the walls. Tough, weedy little things, impossible to eradicate. Yuffie likes them just for that.

She's only ever been to Midgar once before, and there'd been no time for sightseeing then. Between infiltrating the Shinra tower and making it out in one piece, she barely remembers having time to breathe. Still, she'd picked up enough of the way things were that the changes are disturbing - the emptiness, mostly, and the quiet, where there had been whirring, rattling, clanking noise. There are monsters here, too, skittering mako mutants that hide in shadows and piles of rubbish, occasional larger beasts. They don't bother her any. She's rappelled down a sheer rock face into a crater of doom to kill a living god, and besides that, she can't shake the sense that this city was more dangerous before it had been abandoned.

Even so, the place is spooky, and the old slum church she knows to look for isn't any better. The splintering wood is rough against her palm, and the door creaks on its hinges as she pushes it open. It's quiet inside. There's nobody here now, but the altar is piled high with trinkets. Pilgrims make their offerings - food, and spilled moonshine poured out on thirsty earth, and flowers, always flowers. They bend to touch the altar, reverently, and then they go. The ghosts stay.

That's what she's heard, anyway. But ghosts don't scare her either, not even the angry kind, and Aeris isn't – she doesn't think – one of those.

"Hey," she says. "I don't - I don't know if you can hear me, wherever you are. Don't know if you know what I'm doing here, or if you care. I just - guess I just wanted to see you again. And they say, you know. They say if I'm lucky, I might."

Silence.

She waits for a second, listening to nothing more than the sound of her own breathing and trying not to admit that what she's afraid of – really afraid of – is not finding anything here at all.

"I've always been lucky," she says, and reaches into her pack, rummages around until her fingers close on the smooth neck of a bottle, which she pulls out and opens and lifts in a sort of salute.

"I brought you some booze. I hear you like that now," she says with a cracked smile. "That's ghosts for you, I guess. Spirits. Heh. Sorry."

It's rice wine, from home. She takes a sip herself, for fortitude, then sets the rest of it on the altar, amid the garlands and faded polaroids, the stubs of burnt out candles. The door creaks, a gust of cold air sending a chill up her spine, and for a moment it feels like there really is something there, in the threshold, invisible.

"Hey," she says, and, "So I guess you really do like booze, then," but nothing answers, and she feels a little stupid for saying anything aloud.

It's getting dark outside, and she's tired from the journey, so she unrolls her bedroll and settles in. She's got as much right to spend the night here as anyone, and more than most, and if anyone tries anything funny in a church they'll get a personal introduction to the pointy bits of Yuffie's shuriken for their effort. But she doesn't think anyone will trouble her here. There's a peace about the place that reminds her of the Sleeping Forest, not quite natural and only safe for those who belong there, which Yuffie is certain – mostly certain – that she does.

After a while, with nothing but her own mind to distract her, she sinks into sleep. When she opens her eyes again, she's standing in a field of flowers. They carpet the ground and stretch as far as the eye can see, green and yellow, waving in a faint breeze. Daffodils. The air is redolent with their pollen and the scent of sun-warmed earth.

Dreaming, of course. She's not usually aware of it, and she has a moment to wonder what that means. Then the wind shifts, and she hears a rustle like cloth on cloth and spins around, grabbing reflexively for a weapon that isn't there and won't be needed anyway.

It's her. Of course it is. She looks just like she used to look, frayed pink coat and heavy boots and long hair falling in a thick braid down her back, no less earthly than she had been when she stood on earth and marveled at the sky.

"You're not real," Yuffie says. "I don't believe in ghosts."

Aeris lifts her eyebrows and smiles as if to say that ghosts believe in her.

"I'm not afraid of ghosts," she amends. "I came here to see you."

"So I see," Aeris says. She sounds just like she used to, mostly, like she's telling a joke that only the two of them understand. Just like always, Yuffie isn't sure that she does.

"Do you want to move on? Dumb question, right? If you wanted to, you would. Right?"

"It doesn't work like that," Aeris says.

"I don't see why not," Yuffie says.

Aeris sits down cross-legged amid the flowers, long grass swaying around her, and says, "Who watches over Da Chao?"

"Gods," Yuffie says automatically.

"Close enough," Aeris says. "The Planet has more than one weapon to call on."

"Is that what you are now? A god?" Yuffie does her best to keep her voice casual, but who the hell is she kidding?

 _A weapon?_ she thinks, but doesn't say. She remembers the ones they fought, and barely survived, in the desert and beneath the sea. She doesn't want to imagine Aeris like one of those, but that doesn't mean she _can't._

But then Aeris holds out a hand, and Yuffie takes it, unafraid in the instant before her mind has time to catch up to her reflexes. She's surprised to find warm solid skin instead of mist and empty air, and she drops her guard again just long enough to find herself pulled down without warning among the flowers. She lands laughing beside Aeris, who needs to be fought off from attempting to rub a handful of spectral dirt into Yuffie's hair and – Yuffie realizes this – doesn't answer.

It doesn't matter. Gods are fickle, but this is Aeris, who used to crack dirty jokes around the campfire at night just to see the blush spread across Cloud's face, who could always be counted on for a willing accomplice to any prank you could imagine. Aeris who used to be her friend. Now they're both looking up into a sky where clouds are gathering, close and heavy with rain. Grass tickles her nose, looking from here like a forest beaded with dew, and Yuffie realizes what's strange about this place. There are no insects. There's no life at all except the two of them and all the flowers, and she remembers – _when had she forgotten?_ – that Aeris doesn't count.

"Why does the Planet need another weapon, anyway?" she asks. "We stopped the world from ending, didn't we?"

Aeris turns toward her, suddenly serious, looking older and more solemn than she ever did in life.

"You think so?" she says, and the real only answer to a question like that is _maybe not_.

Yuffie pushes herself up to a sitting position, and when she looks around again, the landscape has shifted around them to a city of fallen towers, abandoned cars and trains derailed. Midgar again, held poised between death and life. Yuffie sees the world above the plate, once-pristine homes and offices reclaimed by rust and dust and monsters. She sees the world below, beams of dusty light pouring through gaping holes in the once-impermeable barrier of the plate. Something slinks through the ruins, shadowy and oddly fluid in its motion, and Yuffie isn't scared of monsters at all, but she's glad, suddenly, that she's not alone here.

"Worlds end every day," Aeris says. "The Planet keeps on going anyway. What I am now – it's a full time job."

"I guess so," Yuffie says.

"Are you scared?"

"Should I be?"

"Not of me," Aeris says. She pulls the ribbon from her hair and shakes something from it, small and shining like captured starlight.

"Give me your hands," she says. Yuffie does, holds them out and open, waiting.

There's no trick this time. The bright thing Aeris places between Yuffie's cupped palms burns like raw mako, but she folds Yuffie's hands over it, careful but implacable as she leans forward and says, "Wake up."

Yuffie does.

She opens her eyes to solitude and the rafters of the ruined church, her heart beating hard. Her hands are clenched in front of her, the pain she holds between them rapidly fading. She knows that when she looks, there won't even be a mark. But the altar isn't like it had been when she left it. The wine is gone, and in its place, she sees something round and glowing in the low light. A materia, cool to the touch and heavier than it should be, brimming with nacreous light. When she picks it up, it warms to her skin and starts to take on a deeper hue, like blood spilling out into water, then dims until it matches the red she knows from other materia, none of them quite common or ordinary.

 _Why me?_ she wants to ask, but she knows. She's the one who sought this place, who brought wine and made dumb jokes, the one who always sought the power to defend her home. Aeris used to be her friend.

She slots the summon materia into her gauntlet alongside Air and Fire and Cure. It hums there for a fraction of a second before going quiescent, but she can fee the initial brief spark of connection settling deeper in her bones, linking summon and summoner for as long as she chooses to keep the connection alive.

Who guards Da Chao? Leviathan, Titan, Typhon, Phoenix. Who guards the Planet? Aeris Gainsborough and Yuffie Kisaragi, and it's going to be a full time job.

"Guess that went better than it could've," she says aloud, sounding shaky but not as shaky as she might have. There's nothing in the church to answer her, but her gauntlet sits snug around her wrist, and something in her chest feels lighter because of it. When the morning comes, she'll be leaving the city of spirits behind her, but she'll be taking one of them with her.

Maybe she'll dream again.


End file.
